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Babylon
Babylon ( }}}}KA2.DIĜIR.RAKI ; Aramaic: בבל, Babel; , Bābil; , Bavel; , Bāwēl) was a key kingdom in ancient Mesopotamia from the 18th to 6th centuries BC. The city was built on the Euphrates river and divided in equal parts along its left and right banks, with steep embankments to contain the river's seasonal floods. Babylon was originally a small Akkadian town dating from the period of the Akkadian Empire . The town became part of a small independent city-state with the rise of the First Amorite Babylonian Dynasty in the 19th century BC. After the Amorite king Hammurabi created a short-lived empire in the 18th century BC, he built Babylon up into a major city and declared himself its king, and southern Mesopotamia became known as Babylonia and Babylon eclipsed Nippur as its holy city. The empire waned under Hammurabi's son Samsu-iluna and Babylon spent long periods under Assyrian, Kassite and Elamite domination. After being destroyed and then rebuilt by the Assyrians, Babylon became the capital of the short lived Neo-Babylonian Empire from 609 to 539 BC. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, although a number of scholars believe these were actually in the Assyrian capital of Nineveh. After the fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, the city came under the rule of the Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian, Roman, and Sassanid empires. The main sources of information about Babylon—excavation of the site itself, references in cuneiform texts found elsewhere in Mesopotamia, references in the Bible, descriptions in classical writing (especially by Herodotus), and second-hand descriptions (citing the work of Ctesias and Berossus)—present an incomplete and sometimes contradictory picture of the ancient city even at its peak in the sixth century BC.Seymour (2006), pp. 140–142. It has been estimated that Babylon was the largest city in the world from , and again between . It was perhaps the first city to reach a population above 200,000.Tertius Chandler. Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census (1987), St. David's University Press ( ). . See Historical urban community sizes. Estimates for the maximum extent of its area range from 890 to . The remains of the city are in present-day Hillah, Babil Governorate, Iraq, about south of Baghdad, comprising a large tell of broken mud-brick buildings and debris. Etymology The English Babylon comes from Greek Babylṓn ( }}), a transliteration of the Akkadian . Archibald Sayce, writing in the 1870s, considered "Bab-ilu" or "Bab-ili" to be the translation of an earlier Sumerian (formerly thought to be in the obsolete "Turanian" language-family) name "Ca-dimirra", meaning "gate of god",Archibald Henry Sayce, "The Origin of Semitic Civilisation, Chiefly Upon Philological Evidence", Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology Vol. 1, p. 298; read 2 April 1872. based on the characters KAN4 DIĜIR.RAKI (corresponding to the Sumerian phrase kan diĝirak "god's gate") or perhaps based on other characters.Ernest A. Budge, The history of Esarhaddon (son of Sennacherib) king of Assyria, B.C. 681–688; London: Trübner & Co., 1880; pp. 135–136. According to Professor Dietz-Otto Edzard, the city was originally called , but by the time of the Third Dynasty of Ur, through a process of etymological speculation, had become meaning "gate of god" or "god's gate"Dietz Otto Edzard: Geschichte Mesopotamiens. Von den Sumerern bis zu Alexander dem Großen, Beck, München 2004, p. 121. (Bab-Il). The "gate of god" translation is increasingly viewed as a folk etymology to explain an unknown original non-Semitic placename.Liane Jakob-Rost, Joachim Marzahn: Babylon, ed. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Vorderasiatisches Museum, (Kleine Schriften 4), 2. Auflage, Putbus 1990, p. 2 Linguist I.J. Gelb suggested in 1955 that Babil/Babilla is the basis of the city name, of unknown meaning and origin, as there were other similarly-named places in Sumer, and there are no other examples of Sumerian place-names being replaced with Akkadian translations. He deduced that it later transformed into Akkadian , and that the Sumerian Ka-dingirra was a later translation of that, rather than vice versa. Joan Oates states in her book Babylon that the rendering Gateway of the gods is no longer accepted by modern scholars. In the Bible, the name appears as Babel ( , Bavel, Tib. , Bāvel; , Bāwēl), interpreted in the Hebrew Scriptures' Book of Genesis to mean "confusion", . from the verb bilbél ( , "to confuse").Magnus Magnusson, BC: The Archaeology of the Bible Lands. BBC Publications 1977, pp. 198–199. The modern English verb, to "babble", or to speak meaningless words, is popularly thought to derive from this name, but there is no direct connection. Ancient records in some situations use Babylon as a name for other cities, including cities like Borsippa within Babylon's sphere of influence, and Nineveh for a short period after the Assyrian sack of Babylon.Stephanie Dalley, "Nineveh, Babylon and the Hanging Gardens: Cuneiform and Classical Sources Reconciled"; Iraq 56, 1994. References *